Prayer in cathedrals may get you seven years.

"Patriarchy Riot"

This year, Patriarch Kirill’s personal wealth has come under scrutiny too. First came the mysterious tale of the ‘disappearing watch’. A photo showed him sitting at a table bare-wristed, but his reflection in the shiny table clearly showed him wearing a Breguet watch worth at least $30,000.

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Politically, the Church has returned to something like its old tsarist role as the Kremlin’s bosom partner. Putin’s rule is ‘a miracle from God’, the patriarch said in March, and he has advised his flock to vote for the president. When some liberal-minded clerics expressed support for the protest movement, arguing it was part of a moral battle against corruption, the church’s hierarchy was quick to back the Kremlin. ‘The first revolutionary was Satan,’ Archpriest Smirnov said. The Church has a militant arm full of burly, leather-clad activists with a penchant for burning ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘sacrilegious’ novels (including Harry Potter) and attacking gay rights marches. There are also Orthodox Hells Angels who staged a Harley Davidson ride through Moscow as a response to Pussy Riot’s punk prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

The cathedral, demolished by the Bolsheviks in 1931 and rebuilt in 2000, is the most potent symbol of the Church’s return. A Consumer Rights NGO has accused the Church of only using 7 per cent of the cathedral for religious purposes: halls are rented out for private parties and corporate events; in the basement there is a car-wash, car repair shop and car-park. The courts have said that it isn’t commercial activity but ‘gratuitous mutual gift-making for a recommended price’.

"Virgin Mary Mother of God (Punk Prayer)"

Virgin Mary Mother of God
Chase out Putin
Chase out Putin
Chase out Putin

A black robe with stripes on the shoulder
All your parishioners crawling to the altar
A ghost of freedom up in the skies
But Siberia in chains for Gay Pride

The Head of the KGB is their big saint man
Loading the protesters in a prison van
If you don’t want to insult the most Holy Lord
Women! Know your place is in the birthing ward

Shit shit holy shit, shit shit holy shit

Holy Mary Mother of God
Be a feminist to us
Be a feminist to us
Be a feminist

The Church pays homage to degenerate bosses
A black limousine in the procession of the crosses
If a Priest comes to your school today
Take in your purse – you’ll have to pay.

Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin –
The dog would be better off believing in God!
The Virgin Mary’s belt - no replacement for protest
The most holy Mother of God is at the rallies with us

Virgin Mary Mother of God
Chase out Putin
Chase out Putin
Chase out Putin

Matthew 21:12-13

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,

And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

"Revue" Cantata: Personal Preliminaries

Of the six poems comprising Wallace Stevens' "Revue" published in the July 1922 edition of The Dial, it appears that only one poem, "Bantams in the Pine-Woods," has an author-read recording (two different recordings, actually) on PennSound.  Fortunately, there are enough author-read recordings of Stevens' other work to get his metrical tendencies while he read his work aloud.  This is helpful, because getting these metrical tendencies from the page won't be enough.  If you give two poets the same poem and ask each to read it aloud, you'll get two often very different metrical interpretations.  The differences in metrical interpretations especially seem to occur in interpretations of the temporal length of the pauses, both inside the line and in between the lines.  It's not that I think that we will necessarily marry ourselves to Wallace's read-aloud metrical tendencies, it's just that some kind of fidelity through familiarity seems in order.

Buder Branch had the Literary Lives for Stevens.  I checked it out today and I'm about a third of the way through it.

In a box somewhere in the basement is a dog-eared copy of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.  I'll dig around for it tomorrow.

This won't be anywhere near as physically, logistically or technically demanding as scoring and accompanying a 100-minute feature film.  This kind of thing is very new for us, so it'll be creatively demanding.  I hope that I can get my part of it right.

The premiere will be Thursday, September 13th at the Pulitzer.

My plan is to keep an online diary of sorts about how it's coming along with regard to my part of it here on the ol' blog.

'Til next time ...

06-09-12

When I went to the 7-11 this afternoon for a Big Gulp and cigarettes, a woman whose hair and build reminded me of you was pumping gas.  I wonder whether you're ever, say, at the grocery store and there is a man scanning the canned vegetable aisle, and his hair, his build, the way that he stands, or walks or something like that about the man reminds you of me.  Maybe that happens on occasion.

05-20-12

Cloud cover uncooperative for photographing tonight's eclipse.  Very late last night in the back yard I looked up and saw a meteor flash through a small patch of the sky.  I cannot share the meteor.  It will always be only mine. 

05-03-12

To what extent Kanye West and Chris Milk were in dialogue with Jesse Thorn with the "Touch the Sky" video; to what extent the New Sincerity is a Bourdieuian field of play; to what extent the rules of the game are malleable; to what extent field implicates an industry; to what extent the consumer's motivation is palliative.

05-02-12

Whether Seau shot himself in the chest for the same reason that Duerson shot himself in the chest; whether the term athlete is a pretense; whether these men are de facto gladiators; whether there are moral implications of being entertained by these men; whether the Gridiron and the Sandbox are equidistant; whether "over there rather than over here"; whether foreign trauma leads to domestic violence; whether the beatification of Pat Tillman; whether this is what empire looks like.